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Launhardt does not give any reference to earlier literature in the cited paper. The
solution may have been known in mathematics' academia at his times. The mathe-
matician Jakob Steiner is reported to have presented the solution to the general
problem, but the published references (Steiner 1837 , 1881 ) only deal with the
uniform weights version.
Launhardt also mentions a mechanical analogue to the problem: the optimal
point is the equilibrium point of forces pulling it in the directions of the vertices
with respective strengths proportional to the costs per tonne-kilometre. Remark-
ably, this observation had already been applied to optimal plant location as early as
1829 by two French engineers, G. Lam´ and B.P.E. Clapeyron (Franksen and
Grattan-Guiness 1989 ). It is almost sure that Launhardt never heard of their
memorandum explicating the problem and its mechanical solution. This is just
another example of the multiply rediscovered “law of multiple discoveries” (Kolata
2006 ).
7.5
Weber
Alfred Weber, brother of the more famous sociologist Max Weber, was born 1868
in Erfurt. He grew up in Berlin, where his father was a national-liberal city-deputy.
His academic background is Humanities and Laws from which he switched to
economics and got his doctoral degree and habilitation in Berlin under supervision
of Gustav Schmoller, the main representative of the so-called Younger Historical
School. His first chair was at the Karls-University in Prague from where he was
called to Heidelberg 1907. He defended scientific freedom and was a professed
anti-Nazi getting into open conflict with Nazi-power in March 1933 shortly before
he retired (Demm 1986 ; Nutzinger 1997 ).
In 1909 Weber published a monograph outlining a comprehensive theory of the
location of industries (Weber 1909 ; English edition 1929 ), later followed by a
shorter addendum on the specific conditions of a capitalistic economy (Weber
1923 ). Though Weber's book became one of the most famous German
contributions to location theory, modern spatial economics hardly takes anything
from it to build on. Weber's background is the historical school, in particular
Roscher's location studies, though he himself would have contradicted to be placed
in such a context. The Historical School became under attack at the beginning of the
century, and Weber disagreed with its empiricist approach. Opposed to the Histo-
rical School, he aimed at a theoretical foundation of general validity. His only
references to authors before himself is to disqualify them all as foolish (Weber
1909 , Exkurs I: Die bisherige Literatur), in particular Roscher and Sch¨ffle, the
other representative of the Historical School offering a special chapter on location
(Sch¨ffle 1873 ,
265-267).
I subdivide the topic in two stages. The first is rediscovering the previously
mentioned location triangle. This is a clear, rigorously defined problem, and it is
solved, though not by Alfred Weber himself but in an appendix by Georg Pick. Pick
was professor of mathematics in Prague and probably known to Alfred Weber from
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